


Story Ideas:  To a Good Home

by Dark_Dhampir



Category: Being Human, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hellboy (Movies), Highlander: The Series, Justice League - All Media Types, Lost Girl, Mass Effect, RWBY, Sekirei
Genre: Challenges, F/F, F/M, Harems, M/M, Multi, Snippettes, crossovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-05
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2018-10-23 20:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10726410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Dhampir/pseuds/Dark_Dhampir
Summary: Hey all.  I come up with more ideas than I will ever be able to spin out into real stories.  Some I don't think I really can, but that doesn't mean you can't.  These are a collection of short little challenges and examples for you to enjoy and maybe get inspired by, the way I get inspired by other folks' stories.(Originally published on Fanfiction).





	1. RWBY/HARRY POTTER Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I notice that a lot of authors like to have Harry get stranded in Remnant for whatever reason, and this just seemed more fun to me. What's the point in taking all of Harry's friends and native world away. I love (the idea at least of) stories where the Wizards spend a lot of time going "HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT?"
> 
> Also, I'm sure some of you are still wondering about Lily's letter ("Sir and ma'am"), so let me explain. Lily is writing from the perspective of an adult in the 1980's. I'm pretty sure the Gay Rights movement was already going pretty well by them, but I'm not an expert on the subject, and I don't know if gay marriage was a thing in Britain at that point. So, from my point of view, it seems perfectly reasonable (if a little close-minded) that Lily would presume her spell would send Harry to a traditionally gendered, one man-one woman couple. The spell, however, didn't care. Lily asked for the most loving and capable COUPLE in Remnant, so, while she did get a monogamous pair (couple=2), she never specified heterosexual and got a gay couple because she never really considered a gay couple might be the best ones.

**RWBY/HARRY POTTER (Part I)**

**Earth**

WAAAAAAAA!" Baby Harry cried as the noise below shook the house, scaring the one-year-old. Lily stopped what she was doing for a brief instant, maternal instincts compelling her to comfort her child, but she couldn't. If Harry was to have any chance of surviving this night, she would need to work as quickly, but precisely, as possible. There could be no distractions.

Ever since she was a student at Hogwarts, Lily had been fascinated by the concept of Other Worlds; alternate realities, some like Earth, others wildly different. Lily's mind was filled with images of these strange places, influenced in part by childhood stories of Wonderland, Never Never Land, Oz, and Grimms' Fairy Tales. It became her passion, guiding her through the study of Runes, Arithmancy, and even Astrology, a subject few students took after their O.W.L.s. There was very little known about these Other Worlds, but Lily considered herself an expert on what there was.

One thing she'd learned about the Other Worlds was that they all orbited a central hub, not unlike planets orbiting the Sun. However, just like Earth occasionally moved into alignment with the Sun and Moon, sometimes two Worlds would come into alignment with each other. Such occasions were considered the best possible times to travel between Worlds, if you were brave or crazy enough to do so.

Lily was neither; she was desperate, and this was her last viable chance. She and her husband, James Potter, had been part of a secret group known as the Order of the Phoenix, a small team of Wizards and Witches dedicated to battling the Dark Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Voldemort had been waging a war of Terror across Britain, trying to overthrow the government, much of which was either secretly on his side or else too scared to do anything effective against him.

Upon learning of her pregnancy, Lily and James had gone into hiding in Godric's Hollow, hoping to raise their child in relative safety. They hadn't been successful. Somehow, Voldemort had found them; the couple had faced him three times in battle and been among the few to escape alive. To the Dark Lord, that was an unforgivable crime. Now, he and her husband were battling below her. James had told her to take Harry and run, but where would she run to? Voldemort had already set up Wards to keep her from Apparating away, and he likely had his followers posted outside the house to prevent her from fleeing on foot.

Lily picked up baby Harry, wrapped him in a blanket, and began rocking him in her arms as she examined the Runes she'd drawn on the floor. They were perfect, all that was left was a burst of energy to power the spell and—

_CRASH!_

Lily held Harry closer, trying to shield him from the blast as the nursery door was blown away. Her son stopped crying. Perhaps he was too confused to scream anymore.

"Ah, Mrs. Potter, we meet again," spoke the Dark Lord, evidently not caring that he sounded like a Muggle's Saturday morning cartoon villain.

"You killed my husband," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I gave him a chance to live," Voldemort replied, nonchalantly. "And, I'm offering the same to you now, Lily. Hand over the boy, and I will let you go unharmed."

"Why do you want my son?" Lily asked. Her back was to Voldemort, so he couldn't see her surreptitiously place the note she had written into Harry's blanket.

"That is none of your concern," the Dark Lord said. "All that matters is this: you can either give me the boy, or you can die. I don't personally care which."

 _"Expelliarmus!"_ Lily yelled. Drawing her wand from her arm holster, she spun and cast the spell, hoping to disarm Voldemort before he could counterattack.

Voldemort laughed, batting her spell aside as though it were a fly. "As you wish," he said, laughing. _"Avada Kedavra!"_ A sickly green light erupted from his bone-white wand, enveloping Lily, killing her instantly. The red-haired witch fell to the floor, just as she was hit, she positioned her body, so it cushioned the impact; even in death, she continued to protect her son. Voldemort failed to notice this, and even if he had, he would have laughed at the act, at the folly of love. What was the point in protecting the child from the fall, when he was defenseless against Voldemort anyway?

Or, so he thought.

Voldemort prepared to cast the Unforgivable Killing Curse once again, seeking to end the danger outlined in the Prophecy his minion had partially overheard. What he didn't know was that when he had killed Lily Potter, he'd activated the Runes she had drawn on the floor, which he had also failed to notice or if he had, considered them beneath his concern. Something most Wizards failed to grasp was that Magic didn't actually like to disobey the laws of nature. If you didn't tell a spell to break a specific rule, it wouldn't, and there were some laws that simply couldn't be broken, period. One such unbreakable law was the Law of Conservation of Energy: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When Voldemort had killed Lily with his instantaneously fatal curse, all her life energies and magic were forced from her body, but what Voldemort didn't know was that they had to go somewhere. What Lily's runes had done was suck these energies up and used them to power her spell. The spell which, when activated, opened a portal to another world for a few precious seconds, sucking whoever was standing or laying in the focal point of the Runes inside and whisking them away to the destination. Lily didn't know enough about the World closest in alignment to Earth at the moment, but she wasn't taking any chances with her son. Why save him from Voldemort only to have him wind up in the hands of abusers or slavers? So, she'd "programed" the spell to send Harry to the best and most loving couple in the young Wizard's new world, whoever they might be.

Of course, no one's perfect; there were a couple of things Lily hadn't counted on. Blame it on the urgency of the situation, or perhaps her own personal understanding of the world. Lily's understanding of couples was limited by the history of her own world. Magic's was not, and much like when it came to the laws of nature, unless you told a spell to interpret information in a certain way, it would follow the directions _exactly._ This meant that while Lily's choice of the the word "couple" ensured that Harry would be raised by a monogamous pair, it didn't limit the spell to only examining heterosexual parents.

She also hadn't known the explosion of energy created by ripping a whole in the fabric of reality would vaporize Voldemort and a good portion of the house. Though, if she had, she wouldn't have minded.

* * *

**Remnant**

Snow crunched under Ruby's feet as she trudged back home. It was the only sound in the silent, wintery world, and that was good. It meant she was alone, and being alone meant being safe when you were this deep into the wild. The cottage she called home was only a few miles' walk away, but a few miles of uninhabited wilderness was the most dangerous place on Remnant, a world filled with both wild animals and the infinitely more dangerous Creatures of Grimm.

Behind her, on the edge of the cliff, was a simple solitary grave. It was her mother's. As a child, Ruby had visited this place often, especially in winter, when she could almost see the ghost of Summer Rose hovering in the snow behind it. It had been almost impossible to leave sometimes.

Not so much anymore. Oh, Ruby still missed her mother terribly; there wasn't a single day that Ruby wasn't somehow reminded of her loss, and there hadn't been a single milestone in her life she hadn't been sad her Mom couldn't have been there to share with her (except maybe her wedding night—that was the opposite; a moment when she tried not to think about Mom looking down on her from Above and seeing . . . yeah). As time passed, though, Ruby had found new people to love, people who filled the gaps in her heart: friends, sisters, Weiss . . .

Ruby quickened her step at the thought of her wife. Maybe she should use her Semblance and just run home? She was strong enough now that she could sustain the high speeds for the whole trip, although she'd probably crash on the doorstep when she got home, and Weiss would scold her . . .

"WAAAAAAAA!"

Ruby stopped and turned to her right. She gazed into the dark forest. Was that the wind? Was it some kind of Grimm's call? It had sounded like a—

"WAAAAAAAA!"

Ruby activated her Semblance, flying through the trees like a human bullet, her feet barely touching the ground, a stream of rose petals dancing behind her. It only took a moment to find the source of the screams. What she found made her heart break.

Lying in the snow, in the middle of the clearing, was a woman with bright red hair, wearing a sweater (Why? It was the middle of winter.), clutching a screaming baby in her arms. Ruby knelt by the woman's side, lightly touching her hand. Nothing. Not a trace of Aura. The woman must have been dead for hours.

Which was odd, because the whole area was _tingling_ with the presence of some kind of energy.

Saving that question for later, Ruby picked up the child, holding him carefully. It was a boy all right, about a year old, judging by her friends' children. Poor thing must be scared out of his mind.

"There, there . . ." Ruby whispered, wrapping her red cloak around him, drawing the child in close to her warmth. "It'll be OK. I know it doesn't seem like it, but it'll be OK." The boy continued to scream. "Oh, how did Yang calm me down?" she asked, thinking back to how her older sister had comforted her when she was a little girl, just after Mom's death.

Ruby took a deep breath and started to sing. _"Red like roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest . . ."_ Ruby wasn't much of a singer. Yang was better, and Weiss was amazing. Neither of them were available right now, though, so she would have to do. At least the boy seemed to like her singing. His crying stopped, and he fell asleep. Ruby smiled. Maybe she wasn't so bad after all. She looked at the body of whom she guessed was the child's mother, sighing. What was she going to do about this? She couldn't carry the woman and the boy back home. Pretty soon, though, the body's scent would attract scavengers, and it didn't seem right to just let the woman's remains be torn apart by wolves and crows and things. Not after she had obviously tried so hard to protect her baby—

_"Grrrrrrrrrrrr!"_

Ruby looked up. All around her were black, bipedal wolves covered in spiky, bone-like armor. Beowolves. Creatures of Grimm, they were probably attracted here by the child's cries, or more likely, by his pain. Ruby scowled. Allowing the mother's body to be devoured by wolves seemed much more dignified now; Creatures of Grimm didn't scavenge dead bodies—they didn't need to feed to survive. No, these monsters would rip the mother's body apart just for the sake of defiling it. All Grimm knew was hatred for intelligent beings, and acting on that hatred was the closest thing to pleasure they seemed to feel.

Reaching behind her, Ruby pulled out a large rectangle of red metal. A flick of the switch, and it opened up into Crescent Rose, Ruby's own customizable, high-impact sniper rifle/reaper's scythe. The baby sniffled, and she instinctively held him a little closer to her chest. One woman holding a baby against a pack of, _Let's see,_ she started counting, _one, two, three, four . . . thirty-four Beowolves . . ._

She'd faced worse odds than this before Beacon.

* * *

Weiss stirred the pot on the stove, wondering if the soup needed more rosemary. Ruby hadn't come back yet. The former heiress wasn't concerned, though. Ruby was the most skilled and powerful Huntress she knew. She'd taken on gangs, terrorists, mech suits, and Weiss couldn't count how many Grimm the silver-eyed woman had slain. She wasn't worried. Not worried at all . . .

OK, she was worried. Five seconds from pulling out her own hair worried.

It happened every time Ruby went out into the woods without her. Weiss wanted to come, but she always felt as though she were intruding. Oh, Ruby had taken her to Summer Rose's grave several times in the past, but those had been for special occasions, such as honoring the dead woman's birthday, usually with Yang, Blake, Taiyang, and Qrow. This was different. This was Ruby's time to be with her mother, and as much as Weiss knew Ruby would accept her presence, she wasn't "welcome," not really. The one time she'd tried, they'd both felt so awkward, they'd sworn off ever trying again. So, Weiss contented herself with making a late dinner and waiting for Ruby to show up.

Weiss stirred the pot a little faster. She hated waiting. It meant sitting here, safe in her home, while her wife was out in the Grimm-infested woods visiting a place that made her _sad,_ an emotional state which attracted Grimm, remember—and there wasn't a thing Weiss could do about it.

Weiss checked the clock, frowning. Ruby should have been back by now. What was taking her so long? Ruby had been late before, but still . . . If she wasn't home in the next ten minutes, Weiss was going out after her. If she was, Weiss would give the woman a piece of her mind.

SLAM! "Weiss . . . I'm home."

Speak of the dolt. Weiss let go of the ladle and marched to the front door to give Ruby the thorough tongue lashing she deserved for making Weiss worry so much. When the snowy-haired woman got there, however, she was paralyzed by what she saw. Ruby, panting, clothing disheveled, holding her oversized weapon in one hand—it's blade scraping the floor, how many times had Weiss asked her NOT to do that—and a blanket-wrapped baby in the other.

"Ruby . . . what . . .?" the snow-haired woman asked when she finally found her voice.

"Found him in the woods . . ." Ruby explained, still panting. Weiss saw her wife swaying on her feet and moved to her side, knocking the heavy scythe from her hands (who cared about the stupid floor?) and guiding her to the couch. Ruby continued. "His mom . . . dead . . . probably for a few hours . . . Beowolves came . . . Had to kill them . . . all."

Weiss restrained the urge to chastise her wife for not taking the baby and running away from the monsters. The child was asleep now, and didn't need to be woken by her berating Ruby for being a dunce. She mentally noted that she would have to do that later, however. For now, she just asked, "Are you all right?"

Ruby grinned. "Never better . . . Princess."

Weiss sighed, examining Ruby's Aura to see if she was still trying to heal anything. Happily, it seemed drained, but inactive. Ruby would be all right. Eying the baby, she asked "Do you know what the baby and his mother were doing out there? Where did she come from?" The village of Patch was the only settlement only the island. Ruby was the only one brave or foolish enough to go into the woods alone, and she was a trained Huntress. What could have driven this mysterious woman to put herself and her child in such a dangerous situation?

Ruby shook her head. "No. It was odd though, his mom was wearing a sweater, no jacket, like she thought it was fall, not winter."

"Ruby Rose, you dress _exactly_ the same way every season," Weiss pointed out.

"Yeah, but I've got an Aura, and I'm wearing my long underwear under this," Ruby countered. She frowned, "Now that I think about it, I didn't see any tracks leading to the clearing, and there wasn't a vehicle nearby, not that there's many that you could use in a snow-covered forest."

"It was snowing," Weiss pointed out. "Maybe her tracks were covered up."

"I don't think so. It wasn't snowing that hard, so there should have been—hey, a note!" Ruby said, gently extracting the piece of paper from the baby's blanket.

"Let me see," Weiss said, taking it. "This paper . . . it looks almost like parchment . . . It doesn't feel like regular paper . . . Who was this woman?" Orienting the paper, Weiss was about to it read aloud when she saw something. "Ruby, why is there blood on the baby's forehead?"

Ruby's smile morphed into a frown. "It's my fault," she said, gently wiping the blood away. "I got careless, and one of the Beowolves scratched him."

Weiss sighed. "At least nothing worse happened," she said. She knew Ruby was already berating herself worse than she ever could. Her wife was perhaps the most caring person Weiss had ever met. Turning her attention back to the parchment or whatever it was, started to read.

_"Hello, sir and ma'am._

_I'm sorry. What I'm about to tell you may seem impossible. Or perhaps, it will seem perfectly mundane; I have very little idea what your world is like. My name is Lily Potter, and I am a Witch. Does that surprise you? If it does, I promise, magic is real. My son (his name is Harry James Potter) and I come from another world, an alternate reality, if you will. I understand this may sound crazy to you; I understand you may not even be able to read this language, but I am desperate. My husband and I fought an evil Wizard in our world, a Dark Lord. He called himself Voldemort, and his followers were the Death Eaters. We defeated many of his followers, but we had to go into hiding to protect Harry. If you are reading this, then Voldemort, the Dark Lord, has found us. I can't imagine we aren't dead as Voldemort has no concept of mercy. It doesn't matter, however, if my last, desperate plan has worked, and Harry is safely in your world. I used my magic to seek out the best possible couple in your world and sent Harry to you. I'm sorry, but I must ask you, beg you even, please, please take care of my son._

_In your eternal debt,_

_Lily Potter"_

The two women were stunned speechless. What the note said sounded like something out of a story or a comic book. For perhaps five full moments, neither spoke. Neither moved. Then, the baby, Harry Potter, sniffled in his sleep, snuggling closer into Ruby's bosom. The silver-eyed Huntress laughed nervously. "Well, I guess we're parents now, Princess."

Weiss just stared at the woman with whom she had chosen to spend her life. There was only one response to that. "You dunce."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RULES OF THE CHALLENGE:
> 
> Harry is raised by Ruby and Weiss before finding a way to travel back to Earth to attend Hogwarts (starting year is the author's choice). Rules are:
> 
> 1\. Harry has, to a certain extent been trained by his parents in the use of weapons, Aura, and possibly Semblance (maybe he hasn't discovered it yet; he doesn't need to be a prodigy, just different than everyone else).
> 
> 2\. Everyone in the Harry Potter Universe has an Aura, but most if not all of them, have no idea how to use it. Likewise, while magic (or spell-casting if you want Aura and magic to be the same thing, I don't, but I'll leave that up to the author's own tastes) does exist on Remnant, it has largely disappeared from common use. This at least provides a reason for Ruby and Weiss to send their child to school in another world: there's nowhere on Remnant to teach him how to control his powers.
> 
> 3\. Dumbledore knows that Harry survived. Thus, the Wizarding world presumes The Boy-Who-Lived saved them all. Dumbledore also still believes in the Prophecy, and is sort of a Puppetmaster, or at least a wannabee (I'm amused by stories where each one of the old man's attempts to control Harry being thwarted by stuff the supposedly all-knowing Albus Dumbledore just doesn't understand). Whether he's a bearded Voldemort or a misguided old man who wrongly believes he has to sacrifice an innocent child to save the world is up to the writer.
> 
> 4\. Voldemort survived that night. For the purposes of this challenge, I'm presuming Harry didn't get the Horcrux, and the scar came from Beowolves, but that's not mandatory. Regardless, Voldemort still has five or six others, so he's still alive.
> 
> 5\. Don't pair Harry with Ginny. I don't care who you pair him with: Hermione, Luna, Daphne Greengrass, Fleur, Harem. I don't care. Just, not Ginny.
> 
> 6\. Not really a rule so much as a complaint: Ruby, Weiss, and anyone living in Remnant would never call themselves "Lesbians." That term is derived from the Isle of Lesbos. I'm pretty sure there's no Lesbos on Remnant. Sorry, but I just get annoyed whenever writers mention things like "French braids" or "Chinese food" on Remnant when those ethnicities DO NOT exist in their world. It's a pet peeve of mine. Again, sorry.


	2. MASS EFFECT/lOST GIRL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I the only one who looks at the MASS EFFECT wiki where they said Ardat-Yakshi are alien succubi, and wondered why no one thought of this crossover sooner?

"Trick, we need to talk."

The diminutive bar-tender looked up. The woman sitting in front of him was a dark-haired beauty known throughout the galaxy as a hero. He'd known her before all that, though, 'before she was cool' as the kids would say. "Bo," he said. "What brings you here?"

"Can't I drop by to say hello to my favorite grandfather without being compelled to by some catastrophe?" she asked.

"I learned a long time ago that you can't stay out of trouble, Bo. It's why my hair's going gray," the short man answered. The two looked nothing alike, but anyone watching the two wouldn't be able miss seeing the connection they shared.

"Well, at least it took a couple thousand years to get there," the woman replied.

Trick smiled. "I'm old, but I'm not that old. My two thousandth birthday isn't for a decade or so."

Had there been any aliens or humans in the establishment (unlikely, given that they were tucked in an out of the way corner or the Ward, and Trick didn't advertise _The Dal,_ Mark 2), they might have been understandably confused. But, no one in the tavern, a strange combination of European rustic and Citadel Sci-Fi, was truly human. Nor where they alien in the way most thought of the term. They were Fae, members of a confederacy of strange, magical races who had hidden in the shadows of the human world for countless millennia. Looking around the room, Bo saw people she knew as Orges, Frost Giants, Fairies, and a one-handed Mesmer who stuck his tongue out at her from his position by the door. Alongside them were patrons she'd never met before, who could have been Aswang, Hyrdas, Baku or any number of things.

So far, though, there were no Wolf-shifters, Vampires, or Valkyries.

"You look like you could use a drink," Trick said, placing a glass for his granddaughter down on the bar.

She gave a weak smile and nodded in thanks. It had been almost 50 years since Lauren (after choosing to become a Vampire to stay with her forever) had been staked by a Dark Fae assassin, 65 since Dyson had been killed in a fight with a skinwalker, and about 170 years since Rainer, Hale, and Kenzie had all died as a result of that whole 'Doorway to Hel' thing. "Why do all my relationships have to end so badly?" she asked.

"You haven't lost everyone, Bo," Trick said quietly, placing his hand on hers.

"Yeah, but the one's I haven't aren't exactly going well at the moment," she said. "You almost died in the fight with the Garuda. Tamsen and I still can't decide what to do about each other, Liara's turned into the new Shadow Broker—"

"What?" Trick asked.

"Garrus turned into a vigilante on freaking _Omega,_ I've met a new guy named Thane whose dying of some incurable disease, a new lady named Samara with a persecution complex even worse than mine, and I just learned that Kenzie is a Valkyrie now!"

"Well, she technically died in battle," Trick remarked. "I'm guessing you met her . . ."

"While I was dead?" Bo offered. "Yeah, that was about the only good thing about that. The Nain Rouge says hi, by the way."

"That's never a good sign."

"Apparently, the Reapers are coming, and we're all doomed. Why doesn't that kid ever have anything nice to say?"

"Brining tidings of comfort and joy isn't exactly in her job description," Trick replied. "I take it this is what you wanted to talk to me about? Kenzie and the Nain Rouge and," here he paused and looked around, "the Reapers?"

"Yes. No." Bo played with her drink. "There's something else; it's been bugging me for days, but, Trick I don't know if even you can help with this one."

"Bo, I've never pretended to be some kind of miracle-worker," the man who was once known as the Blood King, leader of the Light Fae, and broker of the Truce between Light and Dark said. "All I can do is listen and offer what advice I can; it's all any grandfather can do."

Bo nodded, absently. "When I met Samara, she told me that all three of her children were Ardat-Yakshi." She looked Trick in the eye as she spoke the next words slowly and quietly, "They're Asari Succubi."

"Succubi . . . What do you mean?"

"I know it sounds crazy but . . . I saw one of them. She could seduce anyone, drain away people's life force with sex, and use the energy to grow stronger."

"Amazing," Trick whispered. Alien Fae . . . Why haven't we heard of this before? If the Asari government knows they're real . . . ?"

"Because the Asari hate them," Bo said, slamming her drink down almost hard enough to crack the glass. "They treat the Ardat-Yakshi like lepers, Trick, force them to spend their entire lives locked away in these monasteries or being hunted down by their own people!"

"What?"

"Yeah, apparently the 'leading voice of diplomacy in the galaxy' are little better than Nazis when it comes to their own kind." Bo took another drink.

"I get the feeling these rants are leading up to something a bit more," Trick said, tempted to pour himself a drink.

"I could have been like them Trick," Bo said. "If Dyson, Lauren, Kenzi, and you hadn't been so supportive, I—I don't know where I'd be."

"That's the sort of idea my nightmares are made of," her grandfather admitted. "But, Bo . . . You do realize we're talking about an entire species here. Saving the Rachni was one thing; there were only a handful of them left. I get the feeling there are a lot more Ardat-Yakshi than that."

"I won't let that stop me," the woman said. "I'm going to teach the Ardat-Yakshi what it means to be a Succubus, and teach the Asari what happens when you mess with one."

Trick was silent for a moment, contemplating the woman who stood before him. Very few knew the name Ysabeau of Clan Fin Arvin, but everyone in the Citadel Alliance had heard of Commander Shepard. As she said, the Asari were about to learn a lesson they would never forget. "How can I help?" he asked.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BASIC CHALLENGE:
> 
> Commander Shepard is actually Bo, who decides it's time to help her Asari "cousins" learn to control themselves and live their own lives.
> 
> 1\. For whatever reason, she also has to introduce her friends to the Fae and reveal herself as a Succubus.
> 
> 2\. Samara and Liara are conflicted to say the least.
> 
> 3\. Kenzie is now a Valkyrie, although her "work" keeps her from seeing Bo much.
> 
> 4\. The Light and Dark still exist and still cause trouble.
> 
> 5\. Since Succubi need multiple partners to avoid killing them, this is probably going to be a FemShepxHarem story. Still, it's the writer's choice. Presuming anyone picks up this newest mutation from the pop-culture-irradiated nerd-caverns of my mind.


	3. RWBY/HARRY POTTER Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The continuation of Chapter 1.

**RWBY/HARRY POTTER: Part II**

**Earth**

Albus Dumbledore was not a man who was accustomed to being confused. He was one of the most well-learned Wizards in the world and counted among the most intelligent beings alive. His vast network of contacts and his own positions in education and politics meant he was privy to more secrets than any individual on the face of the Earth. It had been decades since he'd been so thoroughly lost.

He stood in the wreckage of the Potters' home, scanning for magical traces. His scanning spells—combined with general observations—told him three things: Firstly, that Tom had attacked the Potters, apparently having been told of their location by the treacherous Peter Pettigrew—just as Albus had planned. Furthermore, James Potter had apparently been killed in a duel with Tom. A pity, but an acceptable sacrifice nonetheless. The next thing Albus' investigations told him was that Tom had been defeated. Not killed, even without his magical scans, Albus knew his former student had grown too strong and given up too much of his humanity to be killed by any mere explosion. Still, from what little Albus could tell—the nature of the magic was very peculiar and was mixed in with another spell—Tom had lost a great deal of his power and would remained weakened for some time. Lastly . . .

Well, "Lastly" was Albus' problem. He was standing where Tom had fought and presumably killed Lily Potter. He'd hit her with a Killing Curse, no doubt of that. However, rather than being destroyed by some power of young Harry—the Prophecy said Tom would 'mark him as his equal'—it was apparently the result of some magic Lily had worked, but the aged Headmaster couldn't for the life of him discover what kind of spell she'd used. The Runic Array she'd used had been badly damaged by the explosion. What little he could make out was totally unfamiliar to him. Albus wasn't as well known for his knowledge of Runes or Arithmancy as he was his skills at dueling, his accomplishments at Alchemy, or his powers of Transfiguration, but he had studied these subjects and had a better than average grasp of them. Then too were the Astrological elements worked in—a subject Albus had, regrettably, lost touch with over the years.

It would be some time before Albus figured out what Lily's mysterious array was for, and by the time he did, it would be too late; the world Lily had sent Harry to would be too far out of alignment for Albus to follow after. Combined with the struggles of rebuilding the Wizarding World (in his own image, of course) the old Wizard's plans would be put on hold for almost ten full years before he could try to make contact with The-Boy-Who-Lived. This would require them to be greatly modified, as Harry would likely not be the weak-willed, innocent lamb he had planned for him to be.

* * *

**Remnant—10 years later**

Harry woke to the sound of a bird scratching at his window. Blinking, the boy opened his eyes and put on his glasses. About eleven years old—his parents couldn't tell his exact age—he had seen many strange and wonderful things in the world of Remnant. An owl scratching at his window, with a note tied around its leg was a new one, though.

The bird looked very annoyed: its feathers were all ungroomed and looked a little . . . singed? It was still very obviously a regular, tawny owl; not a small Grimm. Hesitantly, Harry opened his window. The bird jumped in and held its leg out for Harry. Untying the string that held it in place, Harry took the small scroll.

"Hey, Harry," his Mom asked, poking her head in. "What do you want for break . . . fast?" The silver-eyed woman paused. "Harry . . . What's going on?"

"I don't know," the boy said. "It was scratching at my window, and it had this tied to its leg." He held up the letter.

Harry's Mom—Ruby Rose—looked at the scrap of paper. It had been almost ten years since she'd seen anything like it, but she would never forget the night her son had come into her life. "Weiss!" she called. "Wake up! Now!"

* * *

"Dear Mr. Potter, we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on the September 1st. We await your owl by no later than July 31st. Yours sincerely, Minerva McGonagall, Deputy Headmistress," Weiss finished reading the first page of the letter aloud.

"Do you think it's from . . . my world?" Harry asked. The boy was well aware of his status as a reality-hoping orphan. Ruby and Weiss—his Mom and Mother—had been forced to explain it when he was seven and . . . things began to happen.

"Possibly," Weiss answered. "The question is, what do we do about it?"

"Beats me," Ruby said. She was examining the list that came with the letter. "I don't get half this stuff, and what did the letter mean, 'our owl?' Do they expect us to use a bird too?"

"Apparently," Weiss muttered. Given how little they knew of Harry's world; perhaps using birds as message-carriers made perfect sense to them, or fulfilled some symbolic purpose. "There's a bigger question we need to answer: should we consider sending Harry to this school at all?"

"Of course not !" Ruby yelled, throwing her arms around Harry. "How could you ask that Weiss?"

"I don't like it either, Ruby," the white-haired woman answered. "But, you know as well as I do that Harry needs training. And now that Professor Goodwitch is no longer with us . . ."

Ruby bowed her head. It had been difficult losing Glynda Goodwitch. The blond-haired Huntress was a tough teacher, but a good one and a wonderful ally. She was also one of the few remaining spell-casters on Remnant. She'd agreed to take Harry on as an apprentice when he was older. Unfortunately, she'd died a few years ago on a mission. Her students and friends took solace in the fact she had died protecting innocent lives. It was a good death for a Huntress.

It did, however, leave the Rose family with a problem; Harry now had no one to provide him with magical training. Considering the last time Harry's powers had activated they'd teleported him to the roof, that was a problem. One they couldn't solve on their own.

"Well, I have to learn to use these powers. Don't I?" Harry asked.

* * *

**Earth**

Dumbledore sat in his office, smiling as he read the reply the school owl had brought him. It looked out of place in Hogwarts, being written on crisp, white paper rather than parchment, but its contents were written in English at least. And they were pleasing to read indeed.

 _Dear Professor McGonagall_ (Who hadn't in fact read this letter or the previous. Dumbledore had acquired a copy with Harry's name on it, attached it to the owl, and sent the bird through his own portal. Then, he sat back and waited for its return),

_We are pleased to hear of our son's acceptance into your school, despite not having applied to it. We have spent the last few days discussing this matter with our closest friends and relatives who are knowledgeable about these matters, as sending our son to a boarding school an entire universe away is not a decision to be made lightly. At length, however, we conceded that it would be wrong to impede the growth of Harry's gifts. Harry will arrive at King's Cross Station on September 1st to begin classes._

_Sincerely,_

_Weiss Rose_

Director of the Rose Dust Company and Huntress of Team RWBY

It was stamped with an unusual symbol, a rose blossom within a snowflake. The letter brought the old man both satisfaction and concern. On the one hand, it was pleasing to know that young Harry would soon be in his hands. On the other, the reply raised a number of worrisome questions. Firstly, the very wording of the letter suggested this Weiss Rose was not someone to be underestimated; the letter clearly spelled out that he or she was already suspicious of him and was capable of calling upon considerable resources should things go south. Ms. Rose had taken pains to highlight that Harry's new family and acquaintances were quite numerous and about as well informed as their world could be and implied that they were concerned about their adopted member's well-being. Possibly concerned enough to fight for him, if it came to that. Secondly, Rose was the head of some business or other. Dumbledore had no idea what the Rose Dust Company was, but he imagined it would at least provide Rose with considerable financial—if not militaristic—resources, and the aged wizard knew the value of money. Finally, Rose had claimed to be a Huntress of Team RWBY, another name Dumbledore could only guess at along with a title, but they were evidently of some import to include them with her signature.

But, most frightening of all was the fact that the woman had suggested that they would bring Harry to the Express by their own means, rather than rely on the Hogwarts staff to pick him up. How was such a thing possible? Did Harry's foster parents perhaps know how to transverse realities?

Dumbledore didn't know. He had sent the owl alone as a test; to see if his methods of travel into the other world and back were safe. When the bird had taken so long to return, the old man had presumed it dead and began double-checking his notes. When it did return, Dumbledore had to decide whether or not to risk a visit himself or send someone in his stead—McGonagall, perhaps, or Hagrid. On the one hand, he couldn't risk himself—his whole plan would fall apart if he were to die, and where would the world be without his guidance?—but he didn't want awareness of young Harry's whereabouts to become common knowledge. However, after sifting through the owl's memories of the affair (not easy to do with animals, but Albus was a rather gifted Legilimens) he had concluded that before releasing the bird to make its return journey, Harry's family had abandoned their home for a new venue. He wasn't certain where; they didn't take the owl with them when they left the house and were careful what they said in its presence, not that Albus had any knowledge of the local geography.

Albus could respect Weiss Rose as a tactician, but he wasn't fond of her for it.

Still, there was some comfort to be had in the fact that Harry would soon be in Hogwarts' halls. More to the point, in a few months' time, he would be trapped in his home world. Hopefully, alone.

It would be some time until Albus got the answers to his questions, and by then, it was too late to do anything about it.

* * *

Stonehenge is one of the most popular visiting sites in England. Every day, there are countless visitors eager to get a look at the much-vaunted ruin. Most are muggle and consider it either a curiosity, or admire it as a work of primitive engineering. Or as proof to any number of conspiracy theories, some more accurate than others. Alongside them, however, are visitors who know a touch more of the truth.

These visitors are aware of its Arthimantic layout, its secret runes, its location on one of the strongest ley lines in the world. All of it was designed to work as an enormous magical focus, a giant wand.

Except, it was a wand no one had ever managed to work. At least, not on public record. Rather than a wand, it was better to think of Stonehenge, and other such earthworks, as more akin to Portkeys or other enchanted objects; it had a single function, and you either used it for that function or you left it alone. What Stonehenge was made to do was still up for debate, and it was too popular amongst tourists, both Muggle and magical, to do any in-depth research.

Of course, sometimes the tours are interrupted. Such was the case one day, in mid-August, when a tour group saw an explosion of energy in the center of the ring as their bus was driving them to the location. The tour guide immediately turned the bus around and began yelling in his radio. Various Muggle tourists chattered among themselves about what could have caused it and what would be done. Magical visitors silently wondered when the Aurors or Unspeakables would arrive to investigate.

Actually, it would be some time before the Ministry of Magic could send a proper response. While the Ministry could monitor magical activity, it was not an omniscient Big Brother. Detecting underage wizardry in Muggle areas was easy, but put enough magical people together and all the Ministry could tell was that there was a lot of magic being used in that particular area; in this way, they lagged behind Muggle satellite surveillance. This meant that, because of all the magical tourists visiting Stonehenge coupled with the huge amounts of energy that ran through the ley line it was built on, the Ministry was never able to set up any real monitoring system for the site. Oh, they had agents in the tourist offices who checked and double-checked everyone who applied to visit, but that was it. Given that Apparating to or from Stonehenge was suicidally dangerous (old records reported those who tried either disappearing without a trace or blowing up in a spectacularly gory fashion) this was considered a workable solution.

Therefore, it was some time before the Ministry had even heard of the incident at Stonehenge, and when it did, the Ministry, being the Ministry, wasted a good deal of time arguing over proper procedure for a situation that had (a careful search of the records showed) never happened before. As such, by the time a team of Aurors had Apparated as close as they could to the site, then trudged the rest of the way there, they had precious little time before the local police came to investigate. In fact, they only got the time they did because the managers of the tour group wasted so much of their own first arguing over whether or not to call the police at all, and then arguing with the officers who arrived at their offices after being called in by panicking tourists.

Afterwards, both law-enforcement agencies would set up a quarantine around Stonehenge, calling in all manner of experts to investigate. The Muggle investigators found nothing, and were left with the hypothesis that a vicious, isolated lightning storm had gone off, or that some person or persons unknown had been fooling around with some manner of electrical device whose nature and purpose were unknown. The Unspeakables did slightly better, informing their superiors that Stonehenge had—somehow—been activated. That was all that was reported to the Minister, and that was all Fudge reported to the press. Some individuals (such as Xenophilius Lovegood of _The Quibbler_ and Madame Bones of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement) thought there was more to the story, but Unspeakables remaining silent on their work, even to the Minister, was par for the course with the Ministry's most secretive agency.

Thus, no one knew that on August 1, 1991, Ruby and Weiss Rose and their son, Harry Potter, were teleported from Remnant to Earth, appearing in the middle of Stonehenge, becoming the first people in more than a century to properly utilize the ruin for its original purpose: a gateway to transverse universes.

Unlike the ritual Lily Potter had used ten years previously, Stonehenge—and its opposite in Remnant, a certain ruined temple located in the Emerald Forest—was not reliant on the movements of universes relevant to each other. Like an enormous, ancient telephone rotary, a would-be traveler "dialed in" the world they wished to visit, hit the "call" rune, and then were transported to the desired world's corresponding gate.

(Though the Rose family didn't know this, at the same instant they stepped through Stonehenge, two American filmmakers were hard at work shaping a feature that was built on this very idea, only with inter-stellar travel instead of trans-universal. They called their creation _Stargate._ )

"Hey, it worked," Ruby said, looking around. Instead of the ruined temple located in the Emerald Forest, she, her wife, and their adopted son were now standing in a ring of stones in the middle of a grassy plain.

"Professor Goodwitch's notes were accurate," Weiss remarked, looking around. "Hopefully, Mrs. Potter's will be the same. Now, it looks like there's a city that way," she pointed to a settlement that looked to be about ten miles away. Not a problem for two seasoned Huntresses and their child.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, who likes the SG-1 reference? That was one of my favorite shows in college. I still haven't watched the original movie, but the DHD was a thing from the show, so meh. For those of you wondering why I was comparing Stonehenge to a movie I haven't seen, it's because the movie came first and didn't come out until 1994. I doubt anyone involved with the project was really thinking about doing a TV series based off it at the time.


	4. RWBY/HARRY POTTER Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to Chapters 1 and 3.
> 
> Anyway, some of you may notice that there was a timeskip between this chapter and the last one. Well, remember, I'm just playing around here, not actually writing a real story. If this interests you, I would encourage you to write your own version of it, which was kind of the point of starting this thing in the first place.
> 
> Just please tell if you do so I can read it. Please?
> 
> Also, I expect some of you will forget this by the time it comes up, but I am using the illustrations from the books as a guideline, that is, that Hogwarts students just through their robes over whatever their wearing as opposed to the movies where everybody is wearing what us Americans slobs would call "dress clothes."

**Earth**

Harry sat in the compartment watching the land rush by. It still amazed him; the idea that people expected to travel through all of this open land without every worrying about being attacked by Grimm. Of course, the train itself was kind of disappointing. It was very old-fashioned looking, probably even still ran on coal instead of the liquid fuels people of this world used instead of Dust, and in spite of the magical station it had been hidden in, it had no apparent enchantments of its own. The thing also had no shock absorbers built in; it bucked and rattled over every little bump in the tracks. Harry was missing Remnant already.

"Do you mind?" A voice asked.

Harry looked up. It was the red-headed boy whose mother had shown him how to get onto the Platform. Harry remembered that she'd said the station was "packed with Muggles," a phrase he didn't understand. He did think it odd that after three children she didn't know better than to say the name of the secret platform out-loud.

"Everywhere else is full," the boy said.

Harry realized he was asking to share the compartment. Of course, this opened the question to where he'd been sitting earlier when the train started. "Sure," the young wizard said. His parents had taught him to be generous to others, if cautious around them.

"Thanks," the redhead said, plopping himself down with his trunk and the cage containing his pet rat in the seat across from Harry. "I'm Ron, by the way. Ron Weasley."

"Harry. Harry Potter." Harry immediately wondered if he'd done something wrong. Ron's eyes bulged comically.

"Really?" he asked. Before Harry could answer he continued. "Do you have the, the scar?"

Harry's eyebrows went up. "What scar?" he asked.

"You know," Ron said. "The one on your forehead. The lightning bolt."

Harry's hand immediately went to his forehead. Underneath his bangs was indeed such a scar. His Mom said he'd gotten it from a Beowolf the night she'd found him. "How'd you know about that?"

"Everyone knows about it," Ron said. "It was in The Prophet."

"The what?" Harry asked.

"The Daily Prophet. You know, the newspaper," Ron said, looking at him oddly.

"Sorry, I'm not from around here," Harry said. In truth, he and his parents had spent most of their time prior to the train ride in the Muggle city of London as it was slightly closer to Remnant than Diagon Alley. Even if it was horribly behind technologically. These people had barely developed an internet for Dust's sake!

"Yeah, The Prophet said you'd been out of the country," Ron said nodding.

"It said what?" Harry asked. "Why does The Prophet care so much about me? Why is it running all these stories? Scratch that, how does it know all this stuff about me?"

"Well, Professor Dumbledore told them," Ron said. "He said you'd been hiding for years, but that you were coming back to the Wizarding World to come to Hogwarts. And he said, you got the scar from when You-Know-Who tried to kill you."

"You mean Voldemort?" Harry asked. Ron's reaction was almost comical. His eyes bugged out even further and his mouth dropped like a ton of bricks. "What? What did I say?"

"You said his name," Ron whispered. "Nobody says his name. Nobody!"

"But hasn't he been dead for a decade?" Harry asked. "My birth-parents killed him, didn't they?"

"Yeah well, people still don't like to talk about him. And what's this about your parents? Everyone knows you're the one who beat him."

Harry snorted. "Yeah right. I was a baby then. What did I do, spit up on him? Unless this so-called Dark Lord was allergic to baby drool, I don't think that'd work." Harry didn't know much about that night; he and his parents had done their level best to avoid the Boy-Who-Lived (was it just a habit of these people to give out long, hyphenated titles or something?) nonsense as soon as they'd figured out it existed. The three doubted that whatever had happened that night was his doing. Harry hadn't even developed his Semblance yet, and his spellcasting left a lot to be desired at present. A one-and-a-half year-old couldn't have beaten a master Wizard.

"But Dumbledore said it was you," Ron protested.

Harry grimaced. "Well, I can't say I remember, but he wasn't there, was he? If he was, my birth-parents wouldn't be dead."

"Birth-parents?" Ron asked.

"I was adopted," Harry said, shifting in his seat. He loved his Mother and Mom, but they'd instructed him to keep mentions of them to a minimum. It would be hard to talk about them without mentioning Remnant. Also, this world seemed to be a little behind on the whole gay marriage thing.

"Oh, well. That's cool, I guess." Ron said.

"Yeah, I love them. What about you, Ron.  What's your family like? Are they all Witches and Wizards?"

"Well," Ron said. "Mum's got a cousin who's an accountant. We don't talk about him much."

Harry's stomach dropped. "Why not?" Harry asked. He recalled how his Aunt Winter told him of her father's attempt to exile his Mother for not fitting into the molds he'd assigned to her. Had Ron's family done likewise to one of their own? Had they succeeded?

Ron shrugged. "He doesn't visit. Mum said he got tired of living in a world full of magic and not being able to do any of it, so he left. We get Christmas and birthday cards from him. That's about it."

"Oh," Harry said. He wasn't sure if that was the truth or if Ron's mother had sanitized events for him. Harry also made a note to look up what "Christmas" was. Was it this world's version of Oumsmas? "What about your brothers and sister? Are they your only siblings or do you have more? Do you have any cousins?"

Ron frowned. "I've got five older brothers. Bill and Charlie graduated already. Percy's in Fifth Year; he's just made Prefect and can't shut up about it."

"Oh, I think I remember him," Harry said. "The one with the badge?"

"Yeah. Then, there's Fred and George, the Twins."

"Not Gred and Feorge?" Harry asked, recalling the pair's antics. Aunt Yang would love them.

"Nah. They're all right, usually. Ginny will be coming next year. She's the baby. And I haven't got any cousins; Mum's an only child, and Dad's brothers were all killed in the War." Harry winced—maybe Ron's fascination was learned behavior. "What about you?" the redhead asked.

"I'm an only child, but I've got a lot of cousins. Granted most of them aren't legally related to me; they're my parents' friends' kids, but we all call each other family. And my Mom's sister adopted a bunch of kids too. They're like sisters to me." Harry smiled as he thought of Topaz, Blanche, and Crimson. All three were Faunus, unsurprising given how passionate Aunt Blake was about her race's welfare and how much Aunt Yang supported her.

"Must be nice," Ron mumbled, "not having to compete with anyone."

Harry frowned. Ron didn't know how lucky he was. Growing up, a lot of the children he knew had dead parents or siblings. It'd been worse in his parents' day; his Mom's status as the child of a second marriage wasn't that uncommon, and while most people knew Uncle Jaune had seven younger sisters, not so many knew he used to have twelve. Aunt Blake and Aunt Pyrrha had both been orphaned young, and Uncle Ren and Aunt Nora . . . They didn't talk much about their childhoods, only that they'd had each other. They never mentioned anyone else.

Harry was saved having to give a lecture by the appearance of an older, rather plump witch pushing a trolley full of sweets. Harry saw the look on Ron's face and asked for some of everything—which thankfully he could afford thanks to his birth-parents. A trip to the Wizarding World's bank had revealed they'd left him a small fortune.

Ron was quite happy to trade both slices of his Bologna sandwich for half of Harry's sweets (Mother had drilled into him a need for moderation, and a few failed attempts to keep up with Mom's sweet tooth had convinced him that it was a good thing). Between bites of meat and mustard, he learned that cauldron cakes were bland, liquorish wands were all right, Every Flavor Beans really do come in every flavor (he ate a green one he was pretty sure was grass and set the box down after that), and Chocolate Frogs weren't real frogs but someone had decided to enchant them so they acted like real living things because yeah, that made eating them easier. Chocolate Frogs also came with a pentagon-shaped trading card featuring a famous Witch or Wizard. Harry's first was the infamous Professor Dumbledore.

"I've got about a hundred of him," Ron said proudly.

"He's gone!" Harry said. He'd been reading the back to see if there was anything useful about the strange, meddling old man, and when he'd flipped it back around again, the image of the Wizard was gone.

"Well, you can't expect him to hang around all day, can you?" Ron said, as though it were perfectly obvious. Harry chalked it up to another oddity of the Wizarding World.

* * *

Like most First Years did upon arrival at Hogwarts, Harry cast his eyes around the castle. Unlike most, however, he was decidedly disappointed. Oh, the ceiling was amazing and the talking pictures (Harry still wasn't sure how they did that. Would the paintings have Auras if he checked them?), and the outer walls gave the place a feeling of strength and grandeur, kind of like Beacon, he thought. Unlike Beacon, the inside of the castle was simplistic, aside from the aforementioned ceiling and paintings. The castle was just an old pile of unpainted stones, lit by torches, actual fire burning torches. Harry was starting to get disappointed with this world's spell-casters. They had so much power but insisted on living as medieval as possible.

Harry raised a hand to the back of his head. He could almost feel Aunt Blake's hand giving a disapproving swat for his cultural insensitivity. It was their world, and they could run it how they liked. Even if it did make no sense.

Harry ignored the castle in favor of listening to the other students' conversations. They were discussing the upcoming sorting, wondering how it was done. His friend from the train, Ron, said that his brothers had told him that it involved wrestling a Troll. From what Harry had read about Trolls in _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,_ that seemed unlikely. Despite that, his right hand drifted to his hip where he'd hidden his weapon under the robe. It wasn't finished, of course, but it made the young wizard, formerly the young Huntsman-in-training, feel better.

To his left, he heard a bushy-haired girl he had met earlier on the train—Hermione, he thought her name was (and what was with these people and all their weird names? Harry still had no idea where his came from, and when he'd asked Ron where his came from and the other boy had just shrugged and said "my Mum liked it") fretting over being made to cast spells as some sort of entrance exam to determine what House they belonged in.

"I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, Mudblood," a voice drawled. "It's not like anyone expects anything from you anyway. You should have stayed with your filth-veined parents where you belonged." Harry looked up and saw a boy with almost white hair sneering at the collective First Years. The boy was their age but stood on the steps to look down on them. He was flanked on either side by a pair of pasty-skinned boys who were either fellow students or shaved gorillas; Harry wasn't sure which. He was trying to look relaxed and disinterested whilst speaking loud enough to be heard by everyone present.

"What's your problem?" he asked, stepping forward to glare at the boy. Between Mother and Aunt Yang, Harry felt he had learned how to do a pretty good glare.

"My problem is all the Muggle-born garbage cluttering the halls that only proper Wizards should walk," the boy answered.

Harry's scowl increased. He remembered a time Cardin, leader of the not terribly popular team CRDL had insulted his Aunts Yang and Blake at a class reunion. Somehow the fact that one was a Faunus and the other married to a Faunus trumped his team's own lack of success after graduation. "Is that so?" he asked. "Well, when if I see any proper Wizards, I'll warn them about the brat with a big mouth and no manners."

The blonde's face scrunched up comically, almost like Mom's did, but way meaner than Mom ever was. "And who do you think you are?"

"I'm Harry Potter, and I don't like bullies." Harry mentally kicked himself, twice. Firstly, he could hear the whispering that erupted at the sound of his name, and secondly, he must've been able to come up with a cooler line than "I don't like bullies."

The blonde boy's eyes widened, and he needed to swallow once to recover. But recover he did. "It's true then, what they were saying on the train; Harry Potter has come to Hogwarts," the blond announced. His attitude had shifted; he was still arrogant, still trying to mask it as refinement, but now he seemed almost approachable. Harry suspected a trap. "This is Crabbe and Goyle," he said, introducing his backup. Harry was almost positive the two were too old to be First Years, given how big they were. "And I'm Malfoy. Draco Malfoy." It was obvious he expected Harry to have heard of the name. Beside him, Ron snorted. Malfoy frowned. "Think my name's funny, do you? No need to ask what yours is. Red hair and a hand-me-down robe? You must be a Weasley." Malfoy returned to his venomous smile (Harry was starting to wonder if he'd need medical attention after this conversation). "Everyone knows the Weasleys all have red hair and more children than they can afford. You'll soon learn that some Wizarding families are better than others; you don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort." Malfoy's eyes shifted to Ron as he spoke for a moment. Then he offered his hand. "I can help you there."

Harry snorted. "Wow, are you dense." Another time, he'd wish he had his Scroll, so he could take a picture of the look on Malfoy's face. "You insult my friends—and my biological mother by extension, since I hear she was a 'Muggle-born'—possibly my adopted parents as well, since you don't know them, strut about like a talking peacock, and you expect me to just fall in as your new lackey?" Harry's frown deepened. Malfoy took a breath to respond, but Harry cut him off. "No. I've met people like you before. I've heard stories from my parents about people like you from when they were in school. For Dust's sake, my adopted grandfather acts like you, and—in case you haven't figured it out yet—NO ONE IN MY FAMILY LIKES HIM!" Harry calmed down and took a breath. "Look, just stay away from me and my friends, and we'll stay away from you. Sound good?"

Before Malfoy could respond he was tapped on the shoulder by Professor McGonigall who announced that they were ready to begin. Harry couldn't help but smile at the sight of the Cardin-wannabe being cowed by a woman who reminded him of Professor Goodwitch. Even if he had to surreptitiously wipe away a few tears. She'd been a good teacher.

He didn't notice how Ron and Hermione reacted to being called "his friends."

McGonigall led them into the Great Hall where the older students were seated at four long tables. It was easy to see these were the four Houses: the brightly colored banners were a dead giveaway. At the end of the Hall, another table stood, this one apparently for the staff. In front of this table stood a small stool, upon which rested an old hat. Harry took one look at the frayed, patched old thing and immediately realized two things: his Mom would love it, and his Mother would hate it.

Then, the hat did the last thing Harry expected it to do (though, in fairness, he had no idea what the thing was supposed to do). It started to sing. It sang much the same way Mom sang, not particularly well, but full of passion and good cheer. The kind of singing you either had to join in with, or cover your ears and hide from. As it sang, the Hat explained that the four Houses were each known for a different virtue or view-point. Gryffindors were brave, Ravenclaws were smart, Hufflepuffs were loyal, and Slytherins were ambitious. Harry mentally began assigning his relatives into each House. Mom was a Gryffindor for sure. Still, why the heck had these people brought an old hat to life just to sort the fresh meat?

McGonigall then began calling people's names alphabetically. Harry noticed that some students the hat had trouble placing. It sat on Hermione's head for a minute or two mumbling to itself before it announced "GRYFFINDOR!" Meanwhile, it declared Malfoy to be in "SLYTHERIN" practically the instant it touched his head.

"Harry Potter!" the Professor called. Harry swallowed and started forward. The hat looked worse up close; as McGonigall placed it on his head, he was afraid it would come apart at the badly-mended seems.

"Don't worry about me, Mr. Potter. I'm more durable than I look."

Harry blinked and looked around. It sounded like the hat was speaking—in his head.

"Oh, don't mind me," the hat said. "I'm just here to see where you belong. If I may say, you've got an interesting background."

You're reading my mind! Harry thought.

"Don't worry; I won't tell anyone. Attorney/client privilege, you might say. All anyone will know is where I sort you. If I can ever decide. Plenty of courage. Not a bad mind either. A strong sense of loyalty. And a thirst to prove yourself, a desire to live up to your parents' legends. But where to put you?

If I may," Harry asked, calling on all the etiquette lessons his Mother had ever given him. "May I please request to be in Gryffindor with my friends?"

Harry heard the hat chuckle in his head. "It's not often I get to meet a young person with such good manners. I don't suppose I can turn down such a request, can I? "GRYFFINDOR!"

The table under the lion-headed banner cheered louder for Harry than they had for anyone else up to that point. Harry found a seat next to Hermione. The rest of the sorting was uneventful except for Ron who—despite looking like someone in an ancient (on Remnant) electric chair under the hat—was placed in Gryffindor along with Harry and his brothers.

In the center of the table at the staff table, the Headmaster stood up. "And now I just have a few short words to say before we dig in: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you."

Harry resisted the urge to bang his ears with his hands. "Did anyone else understand that?" he asked.

"That's just . . ." one of the Weasley Twins said.

"Dumbledore?" the other offered.

"Quite right, George."

"No, I'm Fred. You're George."

Harry was distracted from the conversation by the sudden appearance, literal appearance, of trays of food all up and down the table. Mashed potatoes, green beans, slices of roast beef and ham, piles of rolls, asparagus, creamed corn, and pictures full of orange juice. Harry thought that last one an odd choice for dinner, but maybe it made more sense here than it did on Remnant. It would be one of the tamer differences, really. With this in mind, he poured himself a glass full of juice and took a large swig; he was rather thirsty.

BLECK!

"What-hack-was-hack-THAT?" he finally forced out. Hermione helpfully began thumping his back to try to help clear his throat.

"What's wrong, Harry?" Ron asked. "Something wrong with your juice?"

"That," Harry said, "has to be the foulest orange juice I have ever tasted."

"Orange juice?" Ron asked. "Is that what Muggles call pumpkin juice?"

"Pumpkin juice?" Hermione asked. "Seriously? Wizards drink this? Are you all right, Harry?"

Harry straightened up and tentatively took a sip of the foul brew. Now that he wasn't expecting orange juice, the taste was tolerable. Although why the only other drink option was water, he had no idea. "Why isn't there any tea?" He asked. "I thought British people were supposed to like tea."

The meal continued on more or less normally after that. Except for two things: first was the heated discussion of the fact that the Boy-Who-Lived apparently wasn't a fan of Pumpkin juice. The other was Harry's hesitation every time he took a bite of something new. Harry didn't care how these people looked at him; he was not going through that again.

To cap the night off, Dumbledore rose and invited everyone to sing the school song, according to their favorite tune. What followed was—in Harry's opinion—a complete and utter mess that would have Aunt Blake and her children clawing their own ears out and probably send his Mother into a murderous fury. Aunt Yang and his Mom would probably have fun with it, though. Especially as he could vaguely make out the Twins singing the song as a dirge. Thus suitably inspired, Harry began to belt the lyrics out to the tune of one of Mom's favorite songs: _Red Like Roses_.

He might have chosen _Mirror, Mirror,_ but his voice wasn't right for that. Even before puberty, some things just sounded better out of a girl's mouth. Or maybe it was just Mother was too good. He also briefly considered _This Will Be the Day,_ but discarded it as too loud. He didn't want to draw unnecessary attention to himself.

Regardless, everyone in the room finished at different speeds, with the Weasley Twins wrapping things up. Dumbledore actually wiped a tear from his eye and praised the assembled student body's singing. Judging by the looks on the rest of the faculty's faces, Harry wasn't the only one who thought the old man might be a little crazy.

Or maybe he was messing with themall.

* * *

The weeks passed. Unlike most students who had spent their formative years among Muggles, Harry knew from Professor Goodwitch that magic was about more than saying a few silly words and waving a wand. She had warned him early on that his apprenticeship would be long and filled with many hours of work and study.

It still didn't prepare him for what he had to do at Hogwarts. In fact, he wasn't sure what to do with Hogwarts. The only two courses that involved waving their wooden wands (and why were they all wood, he wondered. Professor Goodwitch had used her riding crop, and he had no idea what it was made of but it was certainly wrapped in leather at least) and saying the words were Charms and Transfiguration. Harry wasn't entirely sure why the two weren't considered the same thing, really, though he was even more disappointed with the coursework; Professor McGonigall had started her first class by transforming into a cat and back which seemed like something that would be very useful to a Hunter (stealthy, sharper senses, innocuous but capable of defending itself to a certain extent), but then informed them they would spend the entire first class turning matches into sowing needles. Charms was more diverse, although Harry didn't need for Professor Flitwick to squeal his name and fall over during the first roll call. Harry was fairly certain the short Professor was at least partially related to the Goblins he'd seen in Gringotts, though Aunt Blake had raised him better than to mention it. Flitwick would do it himself if he wanted to, and that was that.

In addition to those courses, they spent two days a week in the Greenhouses for Herbology, the study and care of magical and mundane plants. Harry thought the first part sounded rather useful, but why did they need to learn how to take care of the plants unless they were planning to make a career out of it. The only people Harry knew who could look after plants were his Uncle Ren (who grew tiny trees in his house which Aunt Nora and their children routinely destroyed), and Aunt Blake (who kept a garden which Aunt Yang and the children knew not to destroy or else). Neither of his parents were any good around plants except for cooking and eating them, and Harry was much the same. If Herbology was half-useless though, it was still better than Astronomy. Once a week (on a Wednesday, no less) the First Years all hiked to the top of the Tower to look at the stars and fill out charts. On Remnant, at Beacon, Astronomy was taught to Hunters to help them navigate when in strange places, and Professor Goodwitch had taught him that keeping track of the movements of the stars would help him keep track of the ways the ambient magic of the world ebbed, flowed, and twisted. Hogwarts taught none of that. They just dragged an army of eleven-year-olds up the staircase at Grimm-begotten midnight to look at a bunch of stars and constellations Harry had never heard of but everyone here expected him to with NO explanation needed, apparently.

"Grimm and Dust this is dumb," Harry muttered. A sleepy Ron had turned to him and asked what he'd said, but Hermione had heard him better and, thankfully, was too concerned with scolding him for thinking any class was dumb than wondering about his odd expletive.

Defense Against the Dark Arts, History of Magic, and Potions were the most understandable classes and had been the ones Harry had been looking forward to most, but were compromised by their teachers. Professor Quirel was a stuttering wreck of a man. According to the rumors, the man had had some bad run-ins with creatures called Vampires and Hags prior to accepting his current position. Harry had to look the creatures up, and they sounded like Hexenbiests and Sangrienta Manos of Remnants' legends, which raised further questions to look into. Apparently, Vampires were also to blame for the scent of garlic that permeated the classroom. The teacher also kept some in his Turban which he claimed he'd been given by a Prince from some place called Africa after defeating something called a Zombie (a Kosche on Remnant, the dictionary was rapidly becoming Harry's constant companion). Given how faint the man got at the mere mention of his previous exploits, however, everyone took that story with a grain of salt.

At least, if you could understand Professor Quirel, he said interesting things. By contrast, Professor Binns the Ghost seemed to turn History of Magic into the single dullest class in the entire school. Everyone but Hermione and Harry fell asleep as he droned on about things and people Harry had never heard of, and even if he had, he'd still have no clue what they'd done because of Binns' lifeless (pun-intended, he might've been around Aunt Yang too long) teaching style. Honestly, the textbook was more passionate about the material than he was. Harry amused himself by imagining Binns was bitter over dying and was working on a way to force the students to join him by boring them to death. "I'm on to him, thought," he told his friends in the hall one afternoon. "Every time I start to feel my heartbeat dropping, I imagine my parents reading bedtime stories to me. Way more adrenaline inducing than that." Cue another lecture from Hermione about paying attention in class and respecting teachers. Followed by another argument between her and Ron about being nosy.

Part of the reason Defense and History were so horrible was because Harry had already met the exact opposite of Quirel and Binns. Professor Port was loud, cheerful, and eager to share his own adventures at every opportunity, and also unlike Quirel, he enunciated all his words. Professor Oobleck, by contrast, was as lively as Binns was dead, and it wasn't just because of his bottomless thermos of coffee. Oobleck cared about history, tried to instill some of that love or at least inquisitiveness into his own students. People sometimes complained that the green-haired man spoke to fast, but Harry didn't think his classes were ever boring.

Finally, there was Potions, a class Harry had been looking forward to because combining various magical substances made him think of Dust, his Mother's area of expertise and the foundation of all of Remnant's civilizations. Unfortunately, it was taught by the single most unlikeable (and unliking) teacher in all of Hogwarts. While Quirel was a mess, and Binns was dull, Snape was just plain mean. If Harry was to compare him to anyone on Remnant, it would be the stories he'd heard of Mordred Schnee, his Mother's biological father. Except whereas Old Man Schnee had hated more or less everything, Snape showed blatant favoritism to the Slytherins, particularly to Malfoy and his goons. Harry on the other hand was the professor's least favorite student; the man had opened the first class by quizzing Harry on various magical plants and their effects. Yes, Harry had tried to read some of his books to prepare for class, but he'd only bought them a week before class had started and they were filled with references and concepts he'd never heard of before. He was still trying to figure out how to deal with this world's stupidly complicated system of money, for Dust's sake!

As such, Harry was looking forward to the dropping out of this school after the Fifth Year exams and disappearing off the face of the Earth back to Remnant (and really, did these people know they'd named their planet after dirt?). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he was doing well in most of his classes. He'd learned to turn a square of cloth into a parchment (mildly useful), could take care of roses (arguably more applicable), knew how many potions rose hips were used in (34, mostly healing and cosmetic potions), could recognize the North Star (which was supposedly three stars but he didn't care), understood the differences between jinxes, hexes, and curses, had learned that the most important culture in the history of the western half of both the magical and Muggle worlds was a Kingdom called Rome, and might be able to brew those rose hip potions if given the chance or the motivation. When they'd started studying levitation in Charms, the only one who'd learned it faster than Harry had been Hermione. And so, the days dragged on until it became the 31 of October, a day the people of this world called Halloween.

Harry's family called it his birthday.

* * *

Harry looked at the magically delivered food on the tables in front of him. "Um, why is it all sweets?" he asked. Indeed, the table was piled high with lollypops, candy corn, treacle tarts (Harry's favorites), and more types of chocolate than he could count. The only non-confection being offered was the pitchers of pumpkin juice, a drink that Harry now found acceptable but was rapidly getting fed up with, since the only time they offered anything else was milk at Breakfast. Harry'd had some impressive birthday parties before but this took the cake. Not literally though, there were pies and cupcakes; real cake seemed to be the only sweet absent from the table.

"What?" Ron, replied through his mouthful of sweets. Ron was never one to miss out on free food. Swallowing, he continued. "Harry, it's Halloween. What do you expect?" Ron was all right most of the time, but his inability to comprehend that Harry was clueless about the Wizarding world was a little annoying.

"Just because it's Halloween doesn't mean we have to eat all this," Hermione said from Harry's other side. "It's unhealthy." Harry had approached her for help with his studies shortly after classes started. The dark-haired Wizard had quickly learned that—despite having been raised with magic—Ron barely knew more than he did about this world. Which was pretty pathetic when you thought about it. Hermione had been hesitant at first but eventually warmed up to him. The two had quickly discovered they had a love of learning and had become fast friends.

It was a shame his two friends didn't seem to like each other very much.

"Just because your parents won't let you eat anything doesn't mean the rest of us can't," Ron snapped.

"My parents let me eat sweets, but they also made sure I knew to only eat a little at a time," Hermione—whose parents were dentists—snapped back. "A lesson it seems you never learned."

Harry swallowed a groan, once again forced to play the part of the demilitarized zone between his first friends in this world. Time for a distraction. "No, I mean why are there so many sweets? I thought Halloween was about celebrating Voldemort's defeat. What does huge amounts of candy have to do with anything?"

Harry realized immediately that he'd made a mistake. It was one thing for Ron to be confused when he didn't know something so important to the Wizarding World, but when Hermione looked at him like he'd grown a second head, he knew he'd made mistake.

"Harry, how do you not know what Halloween is?" Hermione asked. "It's a popular holiday in the Muggle World, too."

"Really?" Ron asked.

"Well, it's more about dressing up in costumes, and telling scary stories," Hermione said. Looking at the table she added, "and eating far too many sweets."

"Sorry," Harry said. "It wasn't celebrated where I grew up." His friends knew he didn't grow up in Britain—his accent took care of that—but they were thankfully laboring under the assumption he had grown up in America. North or South, he had no idea, but at least they didn't think he was from an alternate universe.

"Harry," Hermione said. "Halloween is a very popular holiday throughout the Northwestern world. "People all over Europe and in North America and I believe even Japan celebrate it. Even if your family didn't—and I know there are some people who for personal or religious reasons don't like it—you still should've heard of it."

Harry cringed. "Well, ah you see . . ."

Harry was spared by the sudden arrival of Professor Querril.

"TROLL! IN THE DUNGEONS! TROOOOLLLLLLL! IN THE DUNGEONS!" The man paused for a moment in the middle of the Great Hall for a moment before muttering "Thought you ought to know." Then he fainted.

Naturally, of course, this led to lots of screaming and panicking among the student body until Dumbledore commanded them all to be "Silent!" Then he ordered the Prefects to escort the students to their dorms whilst he took the teachers to the Dungeons to deal with the beast.

"How could a Troll have gotten in?" Harry asked as they filed in behind Percy Weasley with the other Gryffindors to return to the Gryffindor Tower. "I thought they were supposed to be extremely stupid." Harry may not have memorized his Herbology textbook, but he had read _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them_ from cover to cover. Being the child of a pair of Huntresses, he wanted to know about all of the dangerous animals that might try to kill him. It was a bit disappointing actually. Why were Centaurs and Mefolk classified as "Beasts" when they were clearly as intelligent as humans and other so-called "Beings?" The book said it was because they wanted to manage their own affairs, but lumping them in the same category as house pets seemed a little extreme. For that matter why were Jarveys (talking ferret-like things) classified as Beasts when they obviously had the ability to understand human speech and communicate with people? Trolls were supposed to be incredibly stupid. Yet, they made clothes as humans did. Simple clothes, yes, but that was something the lower primates didn't do. And they had their own language, yet could learn to understand and even speak a few human words. Granted a dog could learn the same, but it did suggest that Wizards were exaggerating how dumb Trolls supposedly were.

"Someone must've let it in," Ron said as they were herded to the castle. Harry and his friends were in the rear of the group. "Probably a prank, I'd wager."

"That's incredibly dangerous for a prank," Hermione said. "Someone might be hurt."

"Oh, no," Harry whispered. His friends looked at him. "The Troll's in the Dungeons—Slytherin dorms are in the Dungeons. Why did Dumbledore send them . . ."

"I'm sure he has his reasons," Hermione whispered.

Ron snorted. "Who cares about a bunch of bloody snakes? A few less of them would be pretty nice if you ask me."

"Ronald!" Hermione snapped. "How dare you be so cavalier about the lives of others?"

"What? They're just snakes."

Ron's reply was cut off by a screaming portrait. "It's attacking the Slytherins!" a man dressed like a jester was in a portrait of a garden with children and their caretaker. "The Troll—it was leaving the Dungeons! And they were trying to get to the door! Merlin! It'll be horrible!"

The train of Gryffindors stopped, buzzing in confusion. Some—like Ron—made noises or approval. Only Hermione had the presence of mind to ask "What about the teachers?"

"They went the wrong way!" the Jester screamed. "They'll never make it!"

"Harry! Where are you going?" Neville asked, prompting Hermione and Ron to turn around—just in time to see Harry's robes disappear around a corner.

* * *

Harry stripped his robe off within half a minute of running—Mom might have been able to run in her cloak, but it was a hindrance to him. Underneath, he wore a bright red shirt and a pair of blue jeans. The shirt had a gold lightning bolt stitched onto it in the same shape as his scar: Harry's emblem. He bolted back through the Great Hall down the path he'd seen the Slytherins disappear. A normal eleven-year-old couldn't have kept up at the speed he was moving, never mind the terribly untrained Wizards of this world (Harry wasn't entirely sure what the teachers would do in battle against the Troll), but then, normal eleven-year-olds weren't trained by a family of Hunters. Harry vaulted over every obstacle he could, jumped down flights of stairs using his Aura to absorb the shock.

Harry had never been to the Slytherin dorms before, but he knew the way to the Dungeons. And all too soon, he didn't need to know; he could hear the sounds of children screaming. As Harry rounded the last corner, he skidded to a stop at the sight before him. Before him was a mob of children screaming and pushing each other trying to get away from the thundering steps coming at them. One of the First Years, a blond-haired girl he recognized from the Sorting, tripped and fell. Another Girl Harry presumed to be her friend stopped to try to pick her up, and both fell under the shadow of the Troll as it stomped forward. Harry gasped; there were Grimm less frightening than this monster! At least 10 feet tall and gray-skinned, its huge legs covered with stubby horns. The Troll was bald and wore crude leather clothing. Its ugly heard swung around as the Slytherin Prefects (four of them—two had apparently fled) fired ineffectual spells at it, trying not to be crushed as it swung a club made from a tree trunk at them.

How was he supposed to fight this thing? Harry wondered. Grimm and Dust, what had he been thinking trying to fight this thing? He wasn't a Huntsman or a soldier. He was a child who'd never even attended a day of formal combat training. He should've stayed with the Gryffindors, not gone running after this thing like a storybook hero.

The Slytherin girls screamed as the Troll, now above them, raised its club and brought in down—wooden death coming speeding towards them.

_**BANG!** _

* * *

Daphne Greengrass had a front row seat to the strangest thing she'd ever seen in her entire life. As the Troll brought its club down to crush her and Tracy, there was the sound of an explosion, and a crimson comet collided with the Troll's club, knocking it from the beast's hand.

"Daph . . . Merlin, look," her friend Tracy said.

Daphne turned away from the sight of the Troll stupidly gazing at its now empty palm (the irony was not lost on her), and looked to the side. There, groaning, pushing himself up on his wobbly feet with some manner of metal red staff, wearing Muggle clothes without robes was the person who had saved her and her best friend: Harry Potter.

"Ouch," the dark-haired boy muttered. "Need to remember to ask Mom how she can do that." Unfortunately, this drew the attention of the Troll. Growling, the beast turned on him. Potter spat some dirt from his mouth. "Stop. Please. I don't want to fight you. You don't have to do this." The situation was only becoming stranger. Was Potter trying to reason with the Troll? "You're not a monster; you have a soul, and you have a brain. We can work this out."

It was at this point one of the Prefects decided to fire a curse at the Troll's head. The beast stumbled forward a step or two before turning around. The Prefects panicked and began firing spells randomly again. The beast roared in rage and began trying to smash the students with its empty, but enormous fists.

Another _Bang!_ Sounded, and Daphne saw Potter fly at the Troll once more.

* * *

Harry was not having a good birthday. Firstly, his plan to use his still incomplete, still unnamed weapon like Crescent Rose had reduced him to a groaning lump on the floor. Said weapon looked like Crescent Rose, but minus the magazine, the handle, and the scythe head, a long, red staff with a spear-heard on the end. On the top, was a revolving head loaded with six different types of Dust, like Mother's Myrtenaster. Harry was trying to combine both his parents' weapons to create his own. It was still a work in progress.

Once he'd realized the Troll had heard his whining, Harry tried to reason with it. Again, Trolls might not be the brightest street lights, but they weren't unintelligent. Unfortunately, no one had told the Slytherin Prefects this, who had angered the Troll with their ineffectual spells (didn't they know Trolls were resistant to magic? Grimm and Dust, he wasn't a native of this world, why did he know more about the dangers of it than them?). Naturally, the Troll had taken offense to this and was now trying to smash the older students.

For a brief moment, Harry was tempted to let the invader clear the world's gene pool a little.

Then, he pointed the blunt end of his weapon at the ground. Unlike his Mom, Harry preferred an ejector to a hand-pump, since it made the weapon more stream-lined. Thus, he already had a round or Explosive Dust chambered and ready. Squeezing the triggering mechanism, Harry launched himself at the Troll once more. Mother would probably yell at him for this if she saw him—so would Aunt Blake, Aunt Pyrrha, Topaz, Blanche, and Crimson for that matter—but he didn't want to risk killing the Troll, so this was the best option. Harry brought his legs up. Reinforced with his Aura and powered by the explosion, his feet slammed into the back of the Troll's head. Luckily for the Troll, it was too dumb to turn and look at the sound of the explosion, otherwise Harry would've broken its nose for sure. As it was, the Troll still lost consciousness, falling forward and almost crushing a slow Prefect under it. Harry found he couldn't care.

That might've been because of how he'd crumbled to the floor after making contact with the Troll's cranium. Unlike his parents and relatives, he hadn't quite gotten the hang of landing on his feet yet. After all, he'd never been to a Hunter school, except to visit with his parents and relatives.

And yet, he'd still beaten a Troll. That was a thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Notes: Wow! That was a long one, huh? That's what happens when you can't find a place to start and can't really stop until you find a big flashy event to end it on.
> 
> This one really dives into my headcannon for Remnant. Those parts about how dangerous Remnant is, yeah that's real to me. I stole the idea of Jaune having five dead sisters from "Sunshine and Shadow" by RejectedKnight34, AKA maybe the best RWBY fanfic of them all, but I digress (although, fair warning, that story can be DARK. Not unnecessarily, not unrelentingly, not so bad that you want to stop because you know all your favorite characters will die horribly, but it can be pretty harsh at times). The rest though, that's me. Given how dangerous the world is supposed to be, I feel like there are a lot of broken or mixed families on Remnant.
> 
> The "Remnant Names" for various Creatures are all stolen from the NBC series, Grimm. The Koschei really does look like a zombie and the Hexenbiest is a pretty good example of what a Hag could be, but mostly I just wanted an excuse to play around with the names of Creatures that had been mentioned but not physically seen on the show. I'm nerdy like that.
> 
> I hope I get a chance to explore religion and culture on Remnant more in one of my fics in the future. I've kind of worked out my own headcannon of how they work or how I would do them. Yes, I did the trope of using Monty's name as the name of their God. It's a tribute to the man and when you think about it, it's kind of true.
> 
> References!
> 
> For those who guessed, Harry's Combat/Huntsman outfit is based on Jay Garrick's pre-New 52 costume, minus the boots and the helmet. Literally, the guy's costume was a t-shirt and jeans! I have a fondness for superhero costumes that look like something a normal person could actually through together without an alien power ring or their own billion-dollar company (seriously, where do these guys get their spandex?). The lightning bolt obviously would be modified but you get the idea.
> 
> Also, I would like to apologize to Pax Humana (Achilles on HPFanficArchive) for blatantly ripping him off. His story "The Potter Attraction" was kind of inspirational in how a Harry who was both well-trained and trained by people from another universe/series would react to the Wizarding world.
> 
> I already mentioned "Sunshine and Shadow" and what I stole from it.
> 
> A lot of HP fics make Halloween out as a time Harry hates. I get that, but I always wanted a version of Harry who had once liked Halloween.
> 
> Am I the only one who legitamately wonders why Trolls are considered Beasts?
> 
> I actually didn't have a name for Harry's scepter/spear thing when I made it. Now, I would like to suggest the name "Rose MADR" ("Rose Madder," with the "R" standing for "Revolver" or something rather than "Rapier"). No, I'm not sure how the gun works, I just liked the idea of Myrenaster's revolving Dust cylinders as the focus of the weapon without the rapier, and I liked the "spear" part of Cresent Rose.
> 
> Finally, let's get this out of the way: Topaz, Blance, and Crimson are all basically Faunus versions of Yang, Weiss, and Ruby: specifically a Bear Faunus, a Fox Faunus, and a Wolf Faunus, because those are what everyone says those three would be if they were species flipped. What rule is that by the way, Rule 70? I know a lot of authors like to use magic Dust science to just give our favorite same sex ships (say that five times fast) babies of their own, but I don't particularly like that. I think it's just because of my love of Batman and Robin, but I've always held a special place in my heart for adoption. And, as I said, I feel like Remnant is a world where there's a lot of kids who need to be adopted. Especially Faunus, and we all know Blake wouldn't like that. And Yang would be so supportive of her.


	5. JUSTICE LEAGUE/HELLBOY Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This basically spun out of my fascination with Abe Sapien; the fact that I could never think of him as anything other than an Aquaman homage. Jumping off of that, I wondered, what other classic/iconic DC characters can I put a dark, pulpy spin on so they fit in the world of Hellboy. Note, this does not count folks like The Justice League Dark who are already weird and horror-inspired, like Swamp Thing and Etrigan. Now, without further ado (Liar!) I present, The Justice League of Paranormal Research and Defense (TM pending)!

A motorcycle drove up to the gate. The building behind the wrought-iron structure was identified as "The Metropolis Department of Sanitation." The man checked the address. He checked it again.

Was this a joke? The Sanitation Department? _That_ was the assignment? The Motorcyclist was beginning to suspect that his Academy instructors were playing a prank on him. Not something civilians would expect of the FBI training facility, but Federal agents were human too, and had the sense of humor to prove it.

Still, this was his assignment, so he'd better follow procedure in case this wasn't some sort of secret final exam. He approached the intercom unit and pressed the button.

"What is it?" an unknown speaker snapped. The quality of the intercom was awful; the thing was probably well past its expiration date.

Biting back a noise of disappointment, the motorcyclist replied "Agent Lucas Carr. FBI. Transferred from Quantico."

Immediately, the intercom panel opened up, revealing a sophisticated-looking piece of hardware. Carr marveled at it for a moment before a device that looked like a microscope extended from the device. "Look at the birdy, son," the voice said.

Carr looked into the eyepiece as instructed, only to jump as a bright flash temporarily blinded him in his right eye. Wiping a tear from the offended organ, Carr saw a three-dimensional image of his eye on the "intercom's" screen, soon replaced by his picture and personal information.

The doors opened up without any sort of "welcome" from the voice. Carr snapped his fingers in awe at the sight, then drove his motorcycle up to the building proper. Securing it, he took his bags and entered the structure. Given the James Bond nature of the intercom, he was now quite certain there was more going on than met the eye. Through the doors no doubt laid some highly classified and important operation vital to national security.

He could be forgiven for being disappointed, therefore, when the inside of the building seemed to be nothing more than a gigantic lobby. A nice lobby, mind you, black marble floor with white marble walls and columns. A gold insignia lay on the floor in the center of the room, and across from it was an elaborate golden mural depicting police officers and World War I soldiers saluting each other. On the desk in front of the mural were golden letters spelling out the words _LIBERO ET IUSTUS CONGREGATIO._ Carr couldn't be sure, but he thought that translated as "A Free and Just Society."

The only other person in the room was a single security guard, standing at attention. Carr thought he might as well start by addressing him. "Hello, I'm Luca-"

"You are late," the guard said. "That's what you are. Five minutes."

"Yes, I-I know," Carr stammered a response. "I'm going to-"

"Section 52. I know," the guard said. "Watch your hands and elbows."

"Pardon?" Carr asked, now very confused.

"Watch your hands and elbows," the guard said, a little louder.

Then the floor began to sink. Specifically, the tile with the insignia on it, the one Carr was standing on, began to sink. It went down on a track, into an enormous, subterranean base. Carr began snapping his fingers again. Repeatedly. This was really something, the sort of thing conspiracy theorists stayed up half the night dreaming up. What secrets lay down here, waiting to be uncovered?

When the platform finally came to a halt, locked in place by four metal clamps, Carr stepped off, walking up to a large set of double doors. These were forged into another mural, similar to the one in the lobby, except this one depicted the American Eagle and Shield, with a group of Grecco-Roman-looking gods standing before it. Underneath it ran the words _"_ _Truth._ _Liberty._ _JUSTICE."_ Not knowing where else to go, Carr stepped through.

Inside, he found an ornate library. Countless books lined the walls while statues of saints and angels, carved of stone and gold (don't they ever get tired of gold around here? Carr thought), dotted the room. In the back, a set of spiraling stairs led up to an unknown level. On the right side, the entire wall seemed to be one giant fish tank. Soft music play from unseen speakers.

"Hello?" Carr called out as he walked in, hoping this wasn't a mistake. There were two occupants in the room: a man and a woman playing chess. The man wore dark red goggles. The woman was an attractive blond in a leather jacket. They looked up as he came in.

"Who are you?"

Carr turned. Neither of the chess players had spoken. The speaker sounded like he was to the right of him, which should be impossible, given the giant fish tan-

"I said, identify yourself."

Carr jumped back as a . . . _creature_ swam up to the glass. It was human-shaped, but with blue skin, a small nose, and big, black eyes. Wide tissue stretched between its arms and torso, and it had gills on the side of its neck. Despite this it spoke English perfectly well. In fact, its voice was commanding, imperial even.

"I'm sorry," Carr said. "Are-are you talking to me?"

"Well, he does already know who we are," a female voice said. Carr turned and saw the man and the woman had gotten up and were walking towards him.

"If you're supposed to be the new recruit," the man growled, "you're late." Carr could see he was very pale.

"I'm afraid we must beg your pardon, sir," spoke a fourth voice. Carr turned around and saw a fourth ma—person walking up to him with the aid of a cane. He was an elderly man, dressed in an older suit. He spoke in a soft voice with a British accent. "I've tried to instill some manners into my adopted children, but they all seem reluctant to learn."

The goggled man growled again. "Speaking of which, you didn't call to tell us you were coming home, Alfred."

The old man shrugged. "I suppose you are right, Master Bruce, but one mistake I make does not excuse the many you have all made over the years."

Turning to Carr, the man continued. "My name is Sir Alfred Pennyworth. Formerly of the British Office of Foreign Affairs, and founding member of the Department of Extranormal Operations. Allow me to introduce three of my adopted progeny: Bruce Wayne, Dinah Lance, and behind you is Arthur Curry."

Carr turned back around. "It has a name?"

_"_ _He_ has a name, Agent Carr," Alfred reproved softly. "Master Arthur was a young man when he was found, washed-up in front of a lighthouse in Amnesty Bay. The lighthouse keeper, one Thomas Curry, adopted the boy, naming him and teaching him the ways of our world. When Mr. Curry died, Master Arthur came to live with us."

The old man paused, looking behind Carr, somewhere into the past. Blinking to dispel whatever illusion he was under. "Now, as to why you are here, as you entered the Lobby, there was an inscription."

"A Free and Just Society," Wayne said.

"It's what our organization was founded to protect," Pennyworth explained. "But, I'm afraid it's not always terrorists who threaten that society. No, Agent Carr. I'm afraid there are thing that go bump in the night."

"And we're the ones who bump back," Lance added.

"Indeed," Alfred remarked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basic Challenge:
> 
> Eh, I'll be honest with you folks, there isn't much of a challenge here. The basic idea is to give some of the "normal"/"iconic" DC characters a dark, pulpy, paranormal make-over a le' Hellboy as opposed to the folks in Jusicte League Dark or Agents of S.H.A.D.E., who are already designed to be weird and off-putting. Here's a few examples I'm working with:
> 
> 1\. Aquaman as Abraham Sapien (obviously)
> 
> 2\. Batman as a Vampire (wow, I'm on a roll in terms of obvious choices)
> 
> 3\. Black Canary as a Banshee (and three for three)
> 
> 4\. Cyborg as a Victim of Alien Tech he can't exactly control (Basically, how he is in the NEW 52, a decision I both enjoy and hate because on the one hand it fixes the weird question of "how is Victor Stone or his father able to create highly advanced, super-tech when they're ostensibly normal people, but it also seems like a cop-out. And tying Cyborg's creation back to Darkseid is kind of lame and works better in the more limited scope of the movies than the comics where he has his own adventures separate from the other heroes).
> 
> 5\. Hawkman and Girl as Shapeshifters (able to turn into actual hawks) and/or Anthropomorphic Hawk People (like in Stan Lee's Just Imagine)
> 
> 6\. Green Arrow as Trained Monster Hunter
> 
> 7\. Superman as The Last Son of Mars (basically, what if Superman was secretly Martian Manhunter using his shapeshifting powers to blend in. I like this idea as a way to put an actual superhero into this universe and wonder what the others would have to say about it. Alternatively, he becomes this world's version of Hellboy).
> 
> 8\. Wonder Woman as an Amazon (Kind of on the fence about this one. Yeah, there are good ideas you could play with, but how to separate that from her normal character?).
> 
> Author's Notes: OK, I'm basically just ripping off the first Hellboy movie, a practice I normally find frustrating because I know everything that's going on, is going to happen, and what everyone will say, but helps me here, by giving me a basic framework to fit the story in.
> 
> Fans of the DCAU can obviously tell that "Aquaman" is that universe's depiction of the character (at least in mannerisms) in the body of the live-action version of Abe Sapien. Not that I have anything against the comics' version or the animated one, I just like how inhuman-looking, yet refined the character was in the Guillermo Del Toro films, and that became Abe Sapien for me. The animated version was too human-looking, and acted too much like an average guy to be interesting except as . . . well, an Aquaman rip-off.
> 
> Also, yes, I stole the gold murals from CW's The Flash (I just love those murals), and Bruce has the goggles Langstrom wears in Justice League: Gods and Monsters. Because, Vampire.


	6. SEKIREI AND BEING HUMAN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here's an idea I got surfing the wiki page for DAILY LIFE WITH A MONSTER GIRL. Weird, huh? Rei, the ghost character, wears only a pair of ripped-up jeans, and that reminded me how the ghosts in BEING HUMAN always appeared in the clothes they died in. And I thought how funny it'd be to see Miya flip her lid over the character's "lewd" dress but not be able to do anything about it.

Minato paused as he walked home from the construction site he worked at to look at the MBI building in the distance.  His mother worked in that building.  He took a drink from the bottle of water he was carrying and thought to himself how things might have been.  A year ago, she'd have either made an off-hand comment of "congratulations" about getting accepted to the best university in the country, or she'd have been yelling at him for failing to get in.  Probably the second one given his test-anxiety.  Maybe she would have been doing the same this year.  He wondered if his sister, Yukari, had made it into the Academy.  He hoped so, she was bright and had boundless determination and self-confidence.  Maybe too much determination and self-confidence, really.

Minato hadn’t spoken with either of them in over two years now.  He shook his head.  There was nothing good to come from dwelling on what might have been.  Someday, he promised he would make things right with them, for all his family.  For now though, it was time to go home.

Well, “home” might be a bit much.  He was renting a hotel room with his lovers.  Both of them.   _That_ was one reason he was so reluctant to speak with his relatives; when taken against everything else, though, it was actually pretty normal.  Yukari would undoubtedly call him a pervert—as she always did when he showed even the slightest interest in the opposite sex—and his mother, well, he'd come to accept he'd just have to live with her disappointment a long time ago.  The thing was, he honestly couldn’t have chosen between the two if he'd tried, and he had tried.  Rei and Moka were the most wonderful (and beautiful) women he’d ever met, and they complimented each other perfectly.  One was cold and regal, the other was bright and eager-to-please.  Both were courageous and dedicated to keeping their strange little family safe.  Thankfully, both girls were also bisexual and just as interested in each other as he was.  He couldn't imagine His life sounded like something out of a bizarre science fiction story or a trashy romance novel, but Minato had long ago passed the point of no return; he wouldn't trade his new life for anything.

Smiling, he took out his cell phone.  It was just a burner as even if he could have afforded a better one (and he couldn’t), he and his beloveds  couldn’t afford to make themselves so easily trackable.  Flipping it open, he dialed Moka’s number. 

“Minato,” the voice on the other end replied without preamble.  “I assume you’re done with your shift.”

“I am,” he said.  “I’m headed back to the hotel to kill time with Rei until . . . tonight.”

“I have the late shift,” she replied.  “I can get you into the isolation room without much difficulty.”

“Thank you,” he said.  Moka was an orderly in the hospital.  It was a risky position, since a) it did not at all fit with her personality and b) it put her at risk of discovery.  Either of what she was or who she was living with.  Still, it did come with certain advantages.  Like access to the abandoned and almost forgotten dungeon-esque isolation room.  Or the occasional bag of donated blood deemed “unsuitable” for transplants.

“I’ll expect you at 8:00.  Send my love to Rei,” she said, almost apathetically before hanging up. 

Minato smiled, To most that would have seemed cold, possibly even false, but he’d known Moka for approximately a year-and-a-half now, and he knew she didn’t say anything without a purpose.  There was warmth under her ice, and he and Rei were perhaps the only two in the whole city, perhaps the whole country, who got to hear it.

He punched in Rei’s number.  Thankfully, she’d gotten very good at manipulating physical objects.  “Minato!” she cried, happily. 

“Hello, Rei, how are you doing?”

“Pretty nice,” she replied.  “I actually spoke to a few realtors today, places I’ve checked out online or found in the phone book.  I called them, and they heard me!”  Rei had taken up the task of looking for a new place for the trio to live.  In part this was her way to feel helpful as she was incapable of holding a job as he and Mika were (there were a number of reasons, including her wardrobe).  And it was partly something she felt she owed her lovers after the house they’d been renting had been more or less burned to the ground by her ex-fiancée.  Thankfully, the creep was now in jail, terrified out of his warped mind after what the three had threatened him with.  Normally, Minato would have had moral qualms about that sort of thing.  _Now_ , he thought they’d been nicer than the freak had deserved. 

Rei’s voice dropped.  “No go.  Two of them wouldn’t let us rent without a credit-score, and the third has a strict no-women policy.”  Minato could hear her frown on the other end.  “For pity’s sake!  It’s the 2030’s!  How is that sort of thing still legal, Minato?”

Because city officials were more interested in keeping their new bosses in MBI happy than in dealing with apartment owners with crappy personalities, Minato thought.  He’d been . . . confused when the company had bought the entire city of Tokyo and renamed it Shinto Teito, but he’d only been a child then.  Now, as an adult, specifically an adult who lived in the uncomfortable space where work was unreliable and budgets tight, he was one of many who grumbled about the situation but was powerless to do anything about it.  “I’m on my way back,” he said.  “We’ll talk more about it then.  With Moka tomorrow.  Should I bring home anything special for dinner?” he asked.

“I’m planning to brew some tea with honey,” Rei replied.  The girl had a passion for all kinds of teas, and her part of the unusual family’s meager budget went to buying bags for her to brew.  She loved the brewing process, the smells, and (she had blushed when she confessed this) the taste of the liquids on her lovers’ mouths.  “So, don’t buy any sushi; we don’t want a repeat of what happened last time.”

“No, we don’t,” Minato laughed, recalling the night he’d spent curled over the toilet, his stomach thoroughly emptied, dry-heaving at the merest thought of food.  “Maybe I’ll grab a burger or something . . . it might keep _it_ happy.”

“Maybe,” she agreed.  “Have you spoken to Moka yet?” she asked. 

“I have,” he said, straightening up as he heard thunder roll in the distance.  Weird, it didn’t smell like rain was coming.  “She sends her love.”

“Tell her I send mine,” Rei replied.  “If you see her before I do.  Do you still plan to use the isolation room?”

“Yeah,” Minato replied.  “It doesn’t look like the Arboretum will be opened anytime soon.”

“At least it’ll save us some money on beef,” Rei said.  “Do you think they found . . . claw marks or anything?  Shed fur?"

“I don’t know,” he said.  “You’d think there would have been something on the news if they thought a wild animal was loose in the middle of the city.”  He heard a clatter on the other end of the phone.  “Rei?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she said.  “I dropped the phone.”

“I guess we’ve been speaking a while,” he said, shaking his head.  Despite her progress, she could only objects for a few minutes without dropping them.  “I’ll see you soon, Rei.” 

“See you soon, Minato,” she replied.

The young man closed his phone and kept one walking.  It wasn’t a bad day, all told.

"Look out!"

Huh?

WHAM!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rules of the Challenge 
> 
> 1\. Minato will have his flock: Minato will wing every Sekirei he does canonically. He just now has Rei and Moka (or whatever you chose to name them) alongside them. If you want to include other Sekirei or other supernaturals (psychics, succumbing, witches, etc.), go for it. Just as long as the canon group is there.
> 
> 2\. I don't particularly care which version of the BEING HUMAN mythology you use. Personally I like the U.K. Mythos and story better (I think they did a better job of portraying being supernatural as something that sucks, at least if you want to hold onto your humanity), but the North American version was also well-done and does have some charms of its own (including more ghost-fighting lore was nice, pureblood and reverse-werewolves were interesting concepts, and while I think the witches were over-powered I did like that they were there). I stole the house-burning thing from the North American version, but honestly that was just a convenient excuse to have the characters potentially move in with Miya. The only exception I'm going to make is that Minato's transformations should be more like George's than Josh's, not necessarily in terms of the final product (both wolf-forms have their perks) but in terms of simultaneous heart, liver, and kidney plus every bone, tendon, and muscle tearing and reforming equals pain so intense it should overload his brain and kill him but he can't even lose consciousness (maybe it's because the actor who played Josh couldn't make his voice go as high, but I never thought his transformations were nearly as painful). Also I'd suggest doing the U.K.'s thing where it's a really bad idea to tranquilize and lock a Minato up before the Full Moon rises to keep him contained. Other than that, do whatever makes you happy.
> 
> 3\. Does MBI know about the supernatural? Honestly, I don't care about this. Well, actually, it's more like I can see the merits in both. On the one hand, it makes total sense that they know about this and I've imagined a fairly nice scene of Minato's mother catching him mid-transformation and discovering why he ditched them, possibly explaining everything to Amiya and the others. On the other hand, it would be pretty fun to have the bad guys be behind the 8-ball on something for once, possibly with a lot of "What the F#@$!"-s being bandied around.


	7. SEKIREI & HIGHLANDER Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe no one thought up this crossover before me! Seriously, the Sekirei Plan is the Game from HIGHLANDER, just with fewer decapitations and no safe spaces.
> 
> For those of you who don't know HIGHLANDER: Look up HIGHLANDER! The TV series is one the best things to ever air! Ever! It had drama, action, romance, everything! The effects were good! The music was excellent! The actors hit every note in a symphony of emotions and big ideas about life and death and justice and power! Grudges that lasted millennia! Characters who underwent drastic changes and suffered unimaginable losses! Living legends who lived among living legends! I will never stop singing this show’s praises.

Minato Sahashi opened his phone.  "Hello," he answered. 

"It's me," the woman on the other side said.  "Just got the scores for the entrance exam.  Congratulations, you're in."

"Hm, abusing your position to inform me of my successes?"

"Hardly," Takeshi Sahashi answered on the other side of the line.  "But, you're not the only one who passed."

"So Yukari will be joining me at the University?" Minato asked, casually.

Takami snorted.  "You could say that, but don't forget she wants to study science, not Chinese Literature.  She prefers _practical_ subjects."

 _"Now is that any way to speak to your father, young lady?"_ Minato answered.  In Hawaiian.

 _"Dammit, Dad,"_ Takami replied in the same language (albeit far less fluently), _"Watch what you're saying!  I may be the only trilingual person in the building, but a computer can translate anything."_

Minato decided to ignore his child's hypocrisy.  Ever since she was six years old (which was the age he'd adopted her), Takami had had anger management issues.  He was well-accustomed to her outbursts. Though she seemed to have gotten more paranoid in recent years.  

Tabling that thought for another time, he continued speaking.  "So, when is my 'cousin' arriving?"  This was the cover he had in this life; the nephew of Dr. Takami Sahashi and cousin of her daughter, Yukari.  Sooner or later, he and his child would have to explained to Yukari that she was in actuality, his granddaughter.  That would not be an easy conversation.

"In the next few days." Takami said.  "You might want to consider getting a new apartment.  Goodness knows, you can afford one, _tightwad.”_ The last line was delivered in Hawaiian, and Minato smiled.  For all she’d complained about learning the language, his daughter could wield it as effectively as Minato could wield a sword.  

Her words were truthful, though; like many Immortals, Minato had amassed a substantial sum over the years.  It was amazing what you could save when you never needed to see a doctor.  And he wasn't nearly as well-off as some of his older kindred.  He'd experienced his First Death in 1944; then he'd been Corporal Sahashi of the 442 Regimental Combat Team.  Shrapnel from a Nazi's grenade had killed him.  He'd woken up later to a Buzzing in his head and a soldier who spoke with a Scottish accent standing over him.  "I am Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod," he said by way of introduction. 

Duncan had been a good teacher, not only helping Minato understand his new place in the world, the dangers and responsibilities that came with Immortality and The Game and instructing him in armed and unarmed combat; he'd even helped Minato establish a new identity for himself and sent him to college.  Of course, the Highlander had mocked his protégé's academic leanings, a sharp contrast to Duncan's own, mostly practical and informal education.  That was just one way in which the two men had differed.  Apart from learning to read, Duncan had never had much interest in being trained in anything other than fighting, preferring to use his up-close and personal knowledge of history to get by as an antiques dealer, and even that was a sharp departure from his preferred occupation:  professional fighter of one kind or many others.  By contrast, Minato had a voracious appetite for learning.  He'd first majored in Classics, and eagerly learned new languages just so he could read in them.

Sadly, his adopted child had always lover science rather than literature.  She’d refused to study Greek, and t only Latin she’d ever learned was what was used in technical terminology.  But, that was the burden of a parent. And, he had gotten her to learn Hawaiian, if only for the sake of having a code for when she needed to speak privately with him.  Alas, his daughter would never experience that burden for herself: her own child was just like her as far as he could tell from his (by necessity) limited interactions with her. Speaking of whom, “I’ll look into that.  Assuming she doesn’t want to move into a dorm.” Takami’s snort on the other end of the line suggested that was unlikely.

”There’s something else, Minato,” she said, more serious now. “I didn’t want to bother you during the tests, but-“

”Hold it,” Minato said.  He looked around, the Buzz drilling hard in his skull.  At least he thought it was he Buzz; it felt different. Stronger somehow. Louder.  “I’ll call you later, Takami.   _Aloha,”_ he said and closed the phone. He continued scanning the crowds, looking fo the other Immortal.  His hand instinctively drifted to his the side of his coat . . . I 442 Regimental Combat Team 

”Watch out!” a female voice called from above. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who don’t know, the 442 Regimental Combat Team was composed of Japanese Americans, formed after Congress realized being of Japanese descent didn’t preclude Patriotism. Given how many of them had previously been forced to leave their homes and live in “internment camps” they may have been the most patriotic men who fought in World War II. And they still don’t get enough recognition for it. Ugh . . .
> 
> I made Minato a major in Classics, because so many Immortals (in HIGHLANDER and other franchises) learn a bunch of languages, and I wanted a reason for that. Also, science majors are boring; they’ve been done to death.
> 
> P.S.
> 
> Want to be entertained and help raise money for a good cause? Go check out DESERT BUS FOR HOPE. It’s an annual live webcast done by Canadian Internet Comedy Troupe LOADINGREADYRUN. You can win prizes, by merch, post challenges, and watch the shenanigans of a bunch of very funny people as they play the most boring video game ever non-stop for days on end (seriously, they’re up to six days right now, and that time is STILL being lengthened as people donate more money). All the money raised goes to ChildsPlay to make the lives of children stuck in hospitals just a little bit better (and proving that Internet nerds aren’t antisocial nuts). So, check it out. It’s for the children.


End file.
